WordPress: From Blog to CMS Part II

It’s official — my DreamWeaver site is now gone & everything is running on WordPress. It was not as painful as I thought it would be.

From my last post, I made more pages for my work. I still have some work to do — but I had enough of my recent work published that I decided to go live with the update.

I really worried about moving WordPress to the root directory — and I even made a mistake — but it all worked out in the end. I have been learning to use Cyberduck on my Mac for the FTP — and the software restricted me from moving the blog files to the root directory directly through a copy/cut and paste. I had to download them locally and then upload them back to the server in their new location.

There is an article in the WordPress Codex that explains the process — Moving WordPress. Since I was moving it within the site, it was fairly straightforward — except I forgot to change the WordPress Address and Site Address in the Settings panel before I started moving it. I logged into my phpAdmin on my server to change the addresses directly in the wp_options table for siteurl and home — only to find that WordPress had all ready smartly fixed it. It is such intuitive software.

After the upload, I went to my root directory — and there it was. Then I logged into the admin and checked — and everything worked great.

I really expected more problems. I had more problems with a plugin I once put on my site. That was when I had to learn how to go through phpAdmin on my server and work on database values directly — a helpful skill when you can’t access the WordPress interface.

The Codex article tells you to change your Permalinks if you use them — but I found that mine worked fine. Mine were set to www.virginiagreaves.com/blog — but when I set up the Home Page & Blog Page — the blog started posting to www.virginiagreaves.com/blog/blog — so I worried that that would create problems since I didn’t change the Permalinks at that time. But the truth is that WordPress is smart enough to follow what you’re trying to do.

I did have a scary moment when I tried to access pages that I had created of my work. At first, they came up with error messages that they weren’t found. The only path reference I could find was under the settings for a plugin — which I changed. After some minutes of working on it and finding nothing, they starting showing up. It may be that the database on the server was taking a little more time to process requests because of the move.

So that is really all there is to it. I’ll be loading more of my old work and tweaking things as I go. I haven’t decided if I’ll have summary pages with pictures as I did before or if I’ll just stick with the menus for navigation.